According to Microsoft, its primary goal was to apply its learning from building and operating the cloud services across the company and significantly increase the efficiency of IT professionals.

"We wanted to enable them to scale the work they do and the number of servers each employee could be responsible for. That's the kind of efficiency that public cloud computing can deliver," Microsoft corporate vice-president of management and security, Brad Anderson, said.

The public cloud has become the company's 'design point' for how it builds software, he said.

"We design and build for the requirements of the public cloud, such as scale and security, and then bring that value and efficiency to customers to deploy in their own data centres," Anderson said.

The number of product versions has also been simplified, enabling customers to choose between the standard and datacentre editions of the product, depending on their virtualisation requirements.